Companion site to Creating Digital History (NYU GA HIST.2033)

Property/Land Use Research

Earlier this summer, the blogger Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York – which helps chronicle the often fast pace of urban changes in the city (& focuses heavily on the geographic Village), did a series of posts attempting to pinpoint the location of the diner featured in Edward Hopper’s classic Nighthawks (1942).

Popular discourse has long-held that the location was Mulry Square, a nondescript triangle of land currently owned by the MTA at Greenwich Avenue and 7th Avenue South.

Through some creative archival research, relying heavily on the Municipal Archives tax photo collection from 1939-1941, he comes to quite a different conclusion.

You can read about every twist and turn in his 3-part post, which he was able to turn into an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times. Overall, it is a great example of history detective work using a variety of archival resources.